Microsoft MIX is dead, long live VSLive (we hope). VSLive at Redmond is held on Microsoft’s suburban campus. Depending on where you are coming from this is an excellent venue. MIX was hosted in Los Vegas, a city whose combination of glitz, paranoia and madness I was never very comfortable with. The Redmond campus is sedate. Less, or at least less visible, security. And trees. And lawns. And nice weather. Did I mention that there are trees here. This is a pretty small conference with about 500 attendees.

Monday I attended the Pre Conference Tutorial on WCF development by “Code Conquistador” Miguel Castro. This tutorial was a full 8 hours and Miguel has a definite view point on WCF. He is a pretty sharp guy. We started a little slow with a two hour review of WCF basics. In the second two hours we got into some red meat. The focus was on death to client and server service configuration files. We drilled in pretty deeply on the programmatic alternatives. This topic wants some one to develop an OSS abstraction layer to do this. While we are killing things, Miguel also took us into killing hosting dependency by using Windows services to host the WCF service. This is a topic dear to me and improved Visual Studio project templates apparently make this much easier than it was ‘back in the day’.

After lunch we really ramped up for three hours devoted to instance context, concurrency, threading and locking strategies. This code heavy section could easily consumeid 6 hours alone to get a better overview of this important topic.

Stack overflow.
Miguel has a TEN hour Pluralsight course on WCF coming out this September. That’s where I would go to get this information in consumable quantities. Stay tuned for round two on Wednesday when Miguel takes on dependency injection. This should be a great session.

OK. Tuesday starts three days of regular conference sessions. The five track schedule is all over the map. Notable is the SharePoint track. These folks were often treated as part of the Office development, but MS seems to be trying to bring this group as part of a new Microsoft stack that includes phone device applications and (SharePoint 2013) apps. On the other hand starting in November VSLive will split into two conferences: VSLive and VSLive 360. So maybe not.

Here is a new version of the famous Microsoft Founders photograph. That’s Bill Gates in the front row on the left and Paul Allen on the right in the same row. But WHO is that guy on the RIGHT on the back row?